


one long day (all my love will make you shake)

by clarewithnoi



Series: I obliterate the canon and dance a jig upon its ashes [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Family Fluff, Fluff, It's What We All Deserve, James Potter & Lily Evans Potter Live, au things are good, let me have this I needed serotonin, regulus is baby, will I ever let Snape live in my fiction? probably not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:34:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27949880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clarewithnoi/pseuds/clarewithnoi
Summary: A panicked shout erupted from two rooms over. “We’re going to belate!”“James, for the love of Merlin, shut up. We’re not going to be late.  You think I’d be late to my son’s first Quidditch match?”“Well, I—”“Best not answer that, mate,” called Sirius Black to the vague direction of James as he strode into the kitchen, “I’ve witnessed a few traps in my day, and that was most certainly one of them.”The Potter family goes to watch Harry's first game.  All is well.
Relationships: Harry Potter & James Potter & Lily Evans Potter, James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Marauders & Marauders, Regulus Black & Sirius Black
Series: I obliterate the canon and dance a jig upon its ashes [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2174853
Comments: 45
Kudos: 239





	one long day (all my love will make you shake)

**Author's Note:**

> please enjoy my headcanon/maladaptive rejection of JK Rowling's canon
> 
> I needed to write something happy after my world was turned upside down after finishing "All The Young Dudes," which is just... a masterpiece. Please go read if you haven't!
> 
> Enjoy this tooth-rotting fluff :) title from Novo Amor's "Oh, Round Lake" <3
> 
> would like to take a moment to shoutout to Nina for being such a vocal supporter on all of my platforms! Nina, thank you so much, your reviews mean the world <3

A panicked shout erupted from two rooms over. “We’re going to be _late!”_

“James, for the love of Merlin, shut _up._ We’re not going to be late. You think I’d be late to my son’s first Quidditch match?”

“Well, I—”

“Best not answer that, mate,” called Sirius Black to the vague direction of James as he strode into the kitchen, “I’ve witnessed a few traps in my day, and that was most certainly one of them.”

It was a delightfully sunny day, trees dappling the grass with cool spots of reclusive shade while birds chirped happily in the near-cloudless sky, and the Potter family and Co. were in the midst of pre-floo preparation. Chaos, a welcome and recurring resident in Potter manor, abounded in the vastness of the grand estate.

It was the day of Harry Potter’s first Quidditch match as Gryffindor seeker—the youngest in a thousand years, as James had been reminding any passerby unfortunate enough to bid him so much as a _hello_ —and with the way the manor was abuzz with excitement, one would think it was the final of the Quidditch World Cup.

“Quite right!” James’s voice rang out from room to room. “Cheers, Padfoot—now have you seen my red gloves?”

“Probably next to your red and gold garters.”

Lily looked up, unimpressed, from putting the finishing touches on a set of Gryffindor- and Quidditch-themed cupcakes which she planned to deposit in Harry’s lap the moment the match was over. Her baby boy had inherited her sweet tooth.

“Good to see you, too, Sirius.”

“Greetings on this fine, joyous day!” Sirius sent her a wink. “We’re absolutely buzzing to see little Prongslet dodge those bludgers, aren’t we, Reg?”

Lily rolled her eyes before glancing over to see Regulus Black, who had quietly followed his older brother into the room. Sirius turned around to ruffle the other man’s hair—a habit which Regulus never really seemed to like.

“Cut it _out_ , Sirius.”

“Oh, do calm down, Reggie. I’m just trying to help you style yourself!”

“I don’t need your help with that, thanks.” 

“Thirty-one and still single!” Sirius scoffed. “I’d say you’re a right shot past needing my help. You need a bloody _shaman_.”

“Alright, Regulus?” Lily asked with a smile. She finished icing the last cupcake and swiped a finger’s worth of buttercream into her mouth. 

“Hi, Lily,” he replied, “alright, and yourself?”

“Well, except for my husband driving me mad—rather common, though, that—just fine. And I think you look very handsome with your hair either way, so don’t let Sirius bully you into thinking otherwise.”

Regulus blushed furiously, still unused to Lily’s motherly attention after nearly twelve years of receiving it, but was saved from replying by James bounding into the room. 

He was covered head-to-toe in Gryffindor gear. He gaped at the lot of them.

“Merlin’s beard, you’ve all got no House spirit at all!” James cried. He gestured to their outfits; Lily was wearing a cozy tan jumper tucked into a long, brown skirt. Sirius and Regulus were both adorned in various shades of black and grey.

“Red hair,” submitted Lily.

“I was in Slytherin,” said Regulus.

“Gold and red look garish on my complexion nowadays,” dismissed Sirius.

James looked affronted. “Unbelievable!” and promptly went to gather various hats and scarves to compensate for their lack of attire.

Regulus looked vaguely horrified. “Is he… is he going to be like this for every Quidditch game?”

“Oh, without a doubt.”

“Absolutely.”

They made it into the floo with over an hour to spare, each one of them with some sort of Gryffindor paraphernalia thrown onto their person. James didn’t even have the decency to look abashed at the early time.

“We’ll have the best seats at the pitch!” He reasoned.

Lily cooed, “of course we will, my love,” and patted his hand. She pointedly ignored Sirius’s guffaw behind her.

Walking through Hogwarts as parents had never really caught up to James and Lily; it hadn’t been even fifteen years since they were students themselves, and at the ages of thirty-three, they still felt somewhat dwarfed by the grandeur of the castle.

The same could not be said for Sirius.

“Remember how we used to strut these halls, Prongs?” He smirked, waving his arms about and trotting along as if he owned the place, “We were _gods_.”

“I did not _strut_.”

“We all strutted, Prongs, it was the seventies.”

Lily laughed a loud, delighted laugh, and James slung his Gryffindor-jumper-covered arm around her to pull her to his side. He planted a kiss on her forehead that sent his glasses askew. She righted them as Sirius bounded forward, pulling Regulus along with him and pointing out various statues to him as if the younger man hadn’t also attended the school himself.

“I’m so excited, Lils,” James beamed, looking up toward the sky as they exited the castle and began the walk to the pitch, “I can’t wait to see him play—just like his old man, you reckon?”

Lily’s eyes twinkled as she took him in. He had given up his own Quidditch career to fight in a war at eighteen. He was so achingly beautiful, every part of him, and there was no fathomable universe where she would not love him. “Oh, absolutely not,” she said, “I think he’ll be much better.”

James let out his own bark of laughter. The sun made his hazel eyes look like little galaxies.

They managed to find Remus only about a minute before they ran into Severus Snape, who looked sourly upon the group as though they were trespassing on hallowed ground.

“Hello, Severus,” said Remus diplomatically, “excited for the match?”

Snape barely deigned him a glance. His voice was flat. “Delighted.”

“Bit of a re-hash of the old rivalry, wouldn’t you say, professor?” Sirius grinned. He threw an arm around his little brother, who was fidgeting with the Gryffindor scarf around his neck and doing his best not to wither under Snape’s harsh gaze. “Hope you don’t mind—ickle Reggie’s had somewhat of a… _shift in loyalties.”_

The implications of the statement were bright and glaring, and it was so ridiculously typical of Sirius Black to conjure this sort of moxie at a school sporting event. 

Sirius watched with poorly-concealed glee as the Potions master squirmed—it was as if he had dug up an old landmine and tossed it toward Snape, waiting to see whether it would explode in the other man’s face.

Snape, to his credit, said nothing; he was well-trained by Dumbledore, long used to jaunts and jibes. He shifted his cold gaze toward the Potters.

“Snape,” James nodded in acknowledgement, arm still slung around Lily’s shoulders. It was casual to precisely the same measure that it wasn’t.

“Potter.”

A brief pause followed.

“Well, this has just been a barrel of laughs,” said Lily at length, “but we’ll be going to our seats now.” She put her hand over James’s on her shoulder and began to walk forward. At no point did she bother to address her former friend, nor did she bother to look back at him as she passed by.

Lily and Severus had developed a cordial sort of ceasefire before Harry arrived at Hogwarts—all of which he’d blown to smithereens the second Harry entered first-year potions and was greeted, to his endless confusion, with the Potions master’s ire.

One slightly alarmed owl home saying, _I always thought I was good at potions when I helped mum make draughts, do you think I’m really as terrible as Professor Snape says?_ and Lily went marching into the dungeons to communicate her feelings about this particular issue to Snape in no uncertain terms.

Harry had very few problems after that—and he was none the wiser to his mother’s intervention.

“Ah, my dearest Lily,” Sirius sighed dreamily, sidling up to her unoccupied hip and throwing his arm around her, “I do love how you’re so able to put ol’ Sniv in his place. None of us have ever been quite so good at it.”

“Oh, piss off. You know I don’t take any joy in it.” But her eyes betrayed just the barest hint of humor, and Sirius laughed brightly as he patted her shoulder.

“Absolutely right. My mistake entirely.”

“Right, then,” smiled Remus—who was now swallowed by the large lion-shaped Gryffindor hat James had thrown at him the second they were within shouting distance, “shall we go up to the box?”

Three voices agreed loudly, one decidedly more demure.

Regulus stood a ways behind Remus, still looking just the slightest bit uncomfortable from the encounter with his former housemate. He often looked that way when reminded of his old allegiances—like every vestige of his past was a sign that he didn’t deserve to live in the present. It was the sort of self-flagellation that one learned at an early age at Grimmauld Place. 

Sirius had said once, Lily remembered, that if his brother were ever looking over his shoulder, it wasn’t so much for Voldemort as it was for Walburga’s cane. The conversation had made both herself and James feel ill. 

The next day Regulus’s things were moved into a spare room at Potter manor, and they never spoke Walburga’s name again.

The elder Black took note of his brother’s expression and let go of Lily in favor of grabbing Regulus and throwing him into a brotherly headlock, bending over to shake out the younger man’s hair with his unused hand. “And just _look_ at how dashing my little brother looks in his red and gold, everyone! I’ll say we can find him a girlfriend yet—maybe a nice Quidditch reporter, eh? We can regale her with your tales as Slytherin seeker?”

“ _Ack!_ Sirius—Sirius, _gerroff!”_ Regulus squawked. 

The two boys grappled for another few moments while the others watched on amusedly, listening to alternating cries of “but you’re so _handsome_ , Reggie!” and “I don’t need a girlfriend! Bugger off!”

“Oh, Merlin help me,” sighed Remus. He looked heavenward—possibly seeking some sort of guidance—and then raised his volume, “how’s about we just go to our seats, now? You know, to _watch the match_? What we’re here for?”

It was sufficient enough to spring the two men apart. “Absolutely right, Moony!” Sirius beamed. “My godson’s about to play—what are we waiting for?”

Regulus dusted himself off, looking flushed, but as he nodded his assent he had a shy smile spreading across his handsome face. “I’ll be excited to see if he remembers what I told him about seeking,” he said, “I wrote him some letters with my old strategies.”

“He’s eleven, Reg. I’d be surprised if he remembers not to fall off his broom.”

“Oi!” James slapped his best friend upside the head. “That’s my son you’re talking about! He’ll be a prodigy!”

“Yes, right, whatever. Youngest seeker in a thousand years, you don’t have to tell me again.”

“In A THOUSAND YEARS, Padfoot!”

The five of them began the march up to the visitors’ box, but Lily tugged on James’s jumper sleeve after a few feet of ascent. 

“You all go on, we’ll be there in a bit,” she called to the still-moving backs of her friends. Sirius’s hand shot up in a thumbs-up as a wordless response, as he was engaging Remus in a heated discussion about the likelihood of Puddlemere to beat the Harpies that year. Remus didn’t seem to know but was trying his best to keep up. 

Regulus walked next to them, just the least bit stiff in comparison, tugged along by Sirius’s arm at his back. The two had identical postures—regal and proud and born of high expectations.

“Alright, my love?” James asked as he and Lily made their way around the stadium. She looked up at him and nodded but did not stop tugging him back toward a small, secluded corner of the pitch.

He saw the small, conspiratorial smile playing at the edges of her mouth. It was like every teenage dream he’d ever had: Lily Evans with a mischievous glint in her eye.

As the couple came to a stop next to a blue-and-white checked set of bleachers, James shot his wife a sly grin, very much aware of what was about to happen. He had a moment’s preparation before she launched herself at him and pulled his face to meet hers in a fierce kiss. 

Attempting in vain to suppress his smile, James met her beat for beat and wrapped his arms around her waist to pull her flush against him. He groaned against her lips as she carded her fingers through his hair—it had grown out a bit since Harry went to school, and Lily’s new favorite pastime seemed to be dragging her hands through his curls at any given free moment.

“James,” she sighed against his mouth, and he felt like he’d caught the golden snitch himself.

To the surprise of no one more than her husband, it was Lily who tended to react more strongly to every time they encountered Severus Snape—James had only ascertained why a few years prior, when they ran into each other in _Peverell’s Potions Supply_ in Diagon Alley, and the entire affair sent Lily into a mild fit of rage.

_“It’s like he thinks he—like he thinks he has—” Lily paced the length of the small library in which she and James were sitting. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest as she fumed. “I don’t even know, it’s like he thinks he can—”_

_“—lay a claim on you?” James offered from his seat, eyebrows raised and hand covering his mouth in what he desperately hoped to appear as a stern expression. He was trying very, very hard not to laugh; it was getting more difficult as time went on._

_“EXACTLY!” She cried. “It’s like he thinks he has some sort of claim on me, like he knows me better than myself—like he thinks my life is some great disappointment from whatever it would have been if I hadn’t told him to piss off!”_

_She paused suddenly, chest still heaving from adrenaline, to stare at him._

_James thought briefly that she needed a consoling hug—or possibly a shoulder to cry on? He wasn’t entirely sure—so he stood up and opened his arms in a wordless invitation._

_He was proven incorrect as she practically pounced on him, hissing, “he’s wrong, the git, the absolute—” before she slanted her mouth over his own._

_“Mmph!”_

_James nearly tumbled backward out of sheer surprise but managed to steady the both of them before he reciprocated her vigor. His arms were more than strong enough to hold her, his legs more than capable of reaching her before she ever hit the ground. He was still young, and so was she, and they were young together with a beautiful son napping in his room and friends who were probably emptying their pantry of food at this very moment._

_And Snape was wrong, and he knew nothing, and James Potter would hold Lily Potter, probably right until the day—some distant day, some faraway, theoretical day—he died._

_One of James’s hands tangled in her red hair, the other wound around her waist. He countered her weight easily and bent his knees, sinking them both down to the floor of the Potter library._

_He thought he would not mind at all if this was how Lily handled seeing Snape._

The two broke apart after a few sordid, beautiful moments. People were beginning to filter into the stadium, and dots of red and green were littering their peripheral visions. They exchanged satisfied grins.

“Up to the box?” Lily asked, letting her hands drop from his hair and intertwining their fingers.

James nodded. He wasn’t sure that he should be allowed to be this happy. “Let’s watch our boy play.”

Watching their boy play, as it were, was an immediate source of stress from the moment the first whistle blew until Harry caught— _swallowed_ , they would later recount with horror—the golden snitch.

“THAT’S A FOUL!” James hollered when his son was nearly sent flying from his broom after a particularly hard collision with a Slytherin beater. “HOOCH, GET HIM OFF THE PITCH _BEFORE I DO!”_

He was clutching Lily’s hand so tightly in his own that her fingers had begun to change color, although it didn’t seem as if she noticed at all. Her other hand was covering her mouth as she watched the game with wide eyes.

“Er, James,” Sirius stage-whispered, “I think you might want to—”

“IF ONE MORE BLUDGER GOES TOWARD HIS HEAD I’LL BE REFEREEING THE NEXT MATCH, I SWEAR IT ON MERLIN!”

Sirius’s patience, along with Remus and Regulus’s, only lasted for so long before they gave up and simply allowed him to bellow whatever came to mind. Out of the three of them, Regulus was the most invested in Harry’s progress; he’d been a seeker himself, and he watched with well-trained eyes as the boy scanned for the tiny snitch.

“There,” he whispered suddenly. Harry’s eyes had lit up ever so slightly; it would have been impossible to tell without watching him closely, but his posture had shifted forward just the barest inch as well, “there, I think he’s seen it—"

It was at this very moment that Marcus Flint pilfered a beater’s bat and sent a bludger flying into the stomach of Oliver Wood, which stole the attention of the entire crowd. James spent a few moments howling that this Flint boy should be ejected from Quidditch for an entire season, the little twerp, and to go for the keeper like that, it was downright deplorable—

Remus silenced him with an interjection that spanned just about all of his Quidditch knowledge. “The keeper _was_ quite good, it seemed,” he said in a mournful tone. The others nodded sadly in agreement.

As the match progressed, James sat down with a dazed look. “Was Quidditch always this violent?” His eyes were round and horrified, like he was watching the sport for the first time in his life. “I don’t remember it being this violent.”

Sirius had to hold back a laugh as he agreed with him—if sixteen-year-old James could hear himself now, he’d have an absolute conniption.

 _What old codgers,_ he thought, _the lot of us._

It didn’t take much longer after that for Harry to re-spot the snitch, but then it only seemed to get scarier, what with the diving, and the stretching, and—this was the worst of it all, really—the _falling_ , and the tumbling, and the heaving, and the _snitch? He’s got the snitch?!_

“HE’S GOT THE SNITCH! MY SON HAS GOT—THE—SNITCH!”

Remus thought they might have all deafened each other, the way the five of them were screaming. He thought James might have a coronary and fall twenty-five stories onto the grass himself.

“Well, what are we all waiting here for?!” Sirius laughed. “I want to see my godson!”

“Oh, my _baby!”_ Lily crooned as she ruffled Harry’s perennially messy hair. “My baby boy, you were amazing!”

Harry blushed a bright crimson but leaned happily into her embrace. “Thanks, mum.”

“You were just brilliant, Prongslet!” Sirius leaned over to elbow him in the ribs. “Taught you everything you know, didn’t I?”

“You haven’t played Quidditch with him since he scored a goal on you when he was six,” Remus said flatly. Sirius ignored him.

“And your _charisma!”_ He crowed. “I’m telling you, that is _all me,_ that raw ani—"

Lily cupped her hands over her son’s ears and shot Sirius a glare. “If you say the words ‘raw animal magnetism’ about my eleven-year-old son, I will reverse engineer every product you use until your hair is greasy and your face has the acne of a thirteen-year-old.”

Sirius gaped, horrified. Harry, still unable to hear but apparently unbothered, was nearly hunched over with laughter.

James hung back for a brief period, watching as Harry turned to Regulus and the two began to compare notes on Harry’s final dive for the snitch—which, James hoped, Regulus was soundly discouraging and warning him away from for all future matches. Harry’s bright green eyes shone with happiness as the four adults fawned over him; Lily brushing dirt from his shoulders, Sirius and Remus debating the manner in which their respective influences brought the boy to his current success.

Unbidden, hot, happy tears sprung to the corners of James’s eyes as he watched his family stand on the grass of the Hogwarts Quidditch pitch. Those twenty years ago, he remembered, himself and Sirius had stood in the same spot as Fleamont and Euphemia smothered them with kisses and praise. 

He wished they could have been around to see Harry now—they'd be beaming with happy tears, too, James knew deep in his bones. He felt the ghost touch of their hands on his shoulders as he stared on at Harry, who was describing his dive to his mother in great detail, apparently unaware of the queasy expression on her face as she relived the experience. They would have loved him fiercely.

Harry turned to him then, and as James surged forward to envelop him in an embrace—a warm shelter; the arms of a father—he saw himself, but so, _so_ much better, so smart and so kind and with that Lily Evans smile that just lit up a room. Harry fell happily into his arms, his laughter muffled against James's red jumper. James pressed a kiss to his forehead.

“I’m so proud of you, Harry,” he whispered into his son’s hair, those black messy curls just like his own, “I’m so, so proud of you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed :) writing this certainly made me quite happy.
> 
> Please leave a comment, or maybe go drop me an ask on Tumblr! my username is clare-with-no-i :) I love hearing from all of you!
> 
> And keep a look out for my upcoming story "Bond and Free," which I'm working steadily on alongside "New Age Romancing." Love you all! :)
> 
> -Clare
> 
> XOXO


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